


we got our wires crossed in a stolen spaceship

by fascinationex



Series: bleach works by fascinationex [19]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Canon-Typical Violence, Fluff and Smut, M/M, NnoiTes Week 2018, Spaceships, Xeno, sex with a sentient spaceship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-18 20:55:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16126559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascinationex/pseuds/fascinationex
Summary: Tesla comes up with a creative solution to a pressing and dire problem. Nnoitra's sex life takes a brief but intolerable downturn.He’s beginning to wonder if you can order sex toys to a stolen warship without getting arrested, and if getting arrested might be worth the risk.





	we got our wires crossed in a stolen spaceship

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place after the end of ['and explosions are louder in space because there's no air to get in the way'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15338151), but as long as you're willing to accept a bunch of sicifi tropes and that everything is named after bread, you'll be fine without reading it. The fic's not exactly deep.
> 
> Nnoites week 2018 - Thursday prompt - Scifi AU

_Tesla_ , Nnoitra thinks when he wakes up, but it doesn’t come out through his lips. All he gets is a t-sound and air. The next attempt’s kind of a grunt. Progress.  
  
This is a ship’s infirmary. Nnoitra has seen a few. It smells like old blood and new bleach and the lights are unforgiving. It could be nearly any ship in the galaxy. Probably a friendly one, given that he seems not to be tied down or worse. There’s a splash of rusty-brown blood on the wall which -- oh. That’s familiar.  
  
He’s on the _HMS Pain._  
  
“Tesla,” Nnoitra finally croaks. Where the hell is he? What is the point of having a medic if he’s not fucking here?  
  
“Nnoitra?” comes Tesla’s voice over the public address system. It sounds subtly incorrect. Nnoitra does not have the words to assess another person’s voice, but there’s something much worse wrong with Tesla’s than with Nnoitra’s. The one word proves that much.  
  
Nnoitra sits up, which is a terrible mistake. His injuries are more patched than treated. Did Tesla just give up entirely on medicine once they left the Allied Empire or what? He lets his foot dangle off the side of the bed for a second, and then slowly levers himself up and around until he’s sitting on its side. His legs are long enough that his feet almost reach the floor anyway.  
  
“It’s probably best not to move too much,” says Tesla, again with that weird voice. It sounds exactly like him, but... strange. Synthetic.  
  
“What happened?” Nnoitra mutters. And, secondary question, what the fuck is Tesla doing that’s so much more important than putting Nnoitra back together?  
  
A second after he says it, Nnoitra remembers what happened. Nelliel caught up with them. Again. Fucker.  
  
The _Pain_ could take the Nelliel’s _Hardtack_ with half its weapons systems offline but they hadn’t. Because Nelliel had issued a _personal challenge_ and then...  
  
He remembers clearly Tesla suggesting they shoot them down without response. Fuck, is Tesla still sulking because Nnoitra hit him? Is that what this is?  
  
He squints at the clock display on the far wall. Its red numbers blink peacefully at him. The time is almost meaningless to him -- it’s like his internal sense for it has collapsed. What _day_ is it?  
  
He hadn’t been about to let Tesla stop him from accepting her challenge, obviously, and...  
  
Shame is a crippling roar. Nnoitra drags two of his hands through his hair and clutches the edge of the bed with his others.  
  
One of the reasons his face hurts is because he’s humiliated beyond belief and the panic and overwhelming, crushing depth of that feeling is turning it bright red so fast it’s physically uncomfortable. The _other_ reason, which is probably making the strongest contribution to that pain, is because the last thing Nnoitra remembers is Nelliel with her dainty fingers around one of his horns, ramming his face into the floor.  
  
Then... it gets fuzzy. Really fuzzy. Probably, he guesses, because of the face-ramming.  
  
She should have killed him, but of course she would not have -- Nelliel wants to bring Nnoitra to “justice”, not to make him bleed out all over the floor of her ship. Idiot. That dumb bitch should take her chances where she finds them.  
  
None of this explains why he’s in his own infirmary now, though, or -- “Where the fuck are you?” he snarls.  
  
Nnoitra is painfully aware that having Tesla around has accustomed him to receiving immediate, competent, largely free medical care the very moment he becomes injured. Or... even not really injured.  
  
‘Injured’ for a mantoid is a pretty dire state for most creatures. Tesla will sit him down and, with careful and gentle hands, painstakingly tape up tiny cuts and slices that Nnoitra knows won’t last more than a day -- sometimes not more than a few hours -- on their own.  
  
He wants to rub in _bruise cream_ , for fucks’s sakes. Nnoitra has never had a bruise that actually inconvenienced him in his entire goddamn life. And Nnoitra usually lets him in the end, not because he needs or even wants that kind of care, but because Tesla’s hot, rough-skinned hands feel _so good_ and by the time he’s done Nnoitra’s pretty much ready to drag him down by his hair and fuck until they’re unconscious.  
  
Anyway, Nnoitra knows that Tesla has made him soft. A few months ago he’d never have thought to whine for a medic just because he’s in pain and he can’t remember...  
  
He has flashes. Fuzzy ones. Has he asked Tesla where he is before?  
  
“I’m still here,” says Tesla’s echoing strange voice, which does not help at all.  
  
Maybe if Nnoitra hadn’t spent the last six months indulging Tesla and getting fucked into a relaxed gooey puddle instead of taking contracts he might not have -- with Nelliel --    
  
He’s not thinking about it. (Except of course he is. It’s marinating.)  
  
“What the fuck does that mean? Where are you?” He has to be on the ship. Their comms are only short range. Nnoitra disabled the long-range ones -- a set of fancy bullshit new prototypes that could send a message right to most organisms’ brains from nearly anywhere in the same star system. Cool concept, great for a lot of military purposes like the ones for which the ship was built, but also basically a giant tracking beacon.  
  
“You’ve forgotten again?” says Tesla. He doesn’t have that weird thread of worry in his voice, which is... weird.  
  
Nnoitra tugs harder at his own hair. His head hurts. Under the swelling it’s hot. He doesn’t doubt he’s forgotten something because at a glance that clock says it’s been an hour and a half since he last looked at it. Fuck.  
  
He does remember waking up in a much less friendly room than this one. A couple of times, maybe. And Tesla, fighting, he remembers that, which seems strange because Nelliel issued a personal challenge, right, so -- No. No, that was _after_ the challenge.  
  
The challenge. Which Nnoitra lost. Badly.  
  
He grinds his teeth. He can deal with Nelliel later.  
  
“How did we...” The events are so jumbled. “... get off the _Hardtack_?”  
  
But he knows, already, sort of. He has dim and fragmented memories of sprinting dizzily through the ship behind Tesla’s massive bulk -- he’d changed shape, then, and it might be that he’s not fixing Nnoitra because he’s busy stuffing his face. He remembers thinking: _run_ , and _follow_ , and simply focusing on not falling on his horns in Tesla’s wake.  
  
“Did you get shot?” Nnoitra wonders because he definitely remembers the blood -- bright morphic blood spattered over _everything_ , on his hands and not and sweet in his nose, so thick and strong in the air that he was breathing it in. “You definitely got shot.”  
  
Nnoitra scowls. If Tesla got shot, why is Nnoitra the one in the infirmary?  
  
“Yes. My body wasn’t in good shape, so for now I’m in the ship.”  
  
“You’re what.” Maybe he can’t figure out what that means because of the head injury.  
  
Across from him, the clock display flickers wildly and he blinks up at it. Its red glowing digits go from intergalactic standard to:  
  


##  **: ]**

  
  
“What,” Nnoitra repeats.  
  
“My body remains in the engine room -- I’ll be able to clean it up later, Nnoitra, don’t worry, so --”  
  
“I’m not worried about that.” As if Nnoitra can’t punt a dead body out the airlock on his own. “How did you... The long range comms.”  
  
Tesla’s voice, such as it is, hums.  
  
This explains why Nnoitra’s injuries have not been cared for. Tesla isn’t so stupid he’d treat Nnoitra first while _he’s_ dying, even if he is apparently stupid enough to get fucking shot in the first place. He’ll have put him in the infirmary and then gone and...  
  
Uploaded himself from his derelict body into the warship.  
  
Nnoitra’s gotta see this.  
  
“Please be careful,” Tesla cautions when he gets to his feet.  
  
“You think a couple knocks to the skull are going to kill me, Tesla?” Nnoitra asks in a voice that makes it painfully clear there’s only one good answer.  
  
“Of course not,” says Tesla.  
  
“Then don’t bitch about it.”  
  
He is, despite his comments, very aware of the pain of moving. Tesla’s gotten him all used to stupid shit like chemicals that stop things hurting, and now when things _do_ hurt, Nnoitra is unpleasantly aware of the feeling. Now his ankle hurts with a sharp throb he knows is a break -- Nnoitra has long, long limbs and and his bones had been prone to breaks while they were growing. He knows that feeling better than he knows some of his clothes.  
  
Despite the pain, both feet take his weight as long as he’s careful, and for now his boot seems to be stabilising the ankle. By the time he bothers getting it off the break’ll probably be halfway set, anyway.  
  
He walks gingerly but purposefully. There’s a set of stairs that almost do him in, and then a series of long, unadorned corridors. The metal of the ship is exposed in panels and gauges line the walls here. There’s a still-shiny evacuation plan on one wall. Every so often, the big, allegedly 'self repairing’ arms of the ship are folded into the walls, where their multi-tool hands lay dormant. ‘Self-repair’ is a dumb name for a process that has to be programmed by a person. They’re really supposed to be for emergency system repairs in the cases where atmosphere is lost, he’s pretty sure. But it saves them time on maintenance at least.  
  
The further into the sprawling internal workings of the ship he walks, the more he feels the thick dry heat of them. He finds Tesla in the bowls of the ship just as promised, sprawled on the bare metal floor of the engine room beneath the orange lights. There is, not at all as promised, a second body there. Neither breathes.  
  
A clumsy self repair arm is sticking out of the wall here. It is trying to move the bodies, but it stills when Nnoitra arrives.  
  
It looks like Tesla brought a trial run with him, judging from the fried-meat smell coming from the head of the second body. There’s a bloody circular saw on the floor, a bone chisel, a scalpel, and several clamps and bits of gauze. The face -- what’s left of it -- seems weirdly familiar, although it takes Nnoitra and his pounding skull a moment to place it.  
  
It’s one of Nelliel’s subordinate officers.  
  
A laugh emerges from him in a skull-rattling bark of sound. She’s going to be fucking furious. Serves her right for leaving Nnoitra alive -- and for underestimating Tesla’s determination to get them both back aboard the _Pain_.  
  
He kicks the horse-faced bastard over, bending to peer down at Tesla instead.  
  
He definitely got shot. The exit wound is impressive. Nnoitra can put his finger through him and wiggle it. Huh.  
  
The damage to Tesla’s head seems a lot less significant on the surface, although there’s a great many more wires, and some kind of -- he follows the leads from Tesla’s head -- some kind of suspension of metal in a grey fluid that is still giving off sparks.  
  
Very gently, the big metal arm nudges Nnoitra’s shoulder. He turns and eyes it uncertainly.  
  
“I can dispose of the bodies,” Tesla says, and Nnoitra guesses he knows exactly why Tesla’s voice sounds so goddamn wrong. It’s probably a miracle he can make more than static.  
  
“Both of them?” Nnoitra asks the arm, because he doesn’t know where to look anymore. He toes Tesla’s unresponsive body uncertainly. he uses the wrong foot this time and pulls a tight face at the pain in his ankle. That’s some bullshit.  
  
“Yes,” says Tesla after a pause. “It has been unresponsive for fifty minutes. There’s no point keeping it.”  
  
Nnoitra shrugs and picks up one leg by the heel. “You can get the other one.”  
  
The mechanical arm hesitates. It flicks through several different tools, including one that is definitely a drill bit, and then finally configures itself so a two-pronged metal claw is foremost. The first attempt to pick the body up sends the tip of the claw right through the belly of it. It makes a messy _squelch_. It reeks. Nnoitra grins unpleasantly.  
  
Tesla gets more and more dextrous with the ship’s self repair arms as he goes, passing the officer’s body from one to the next. He’s leaving a trail of fluid, but he seems confident that he can get that cleaned up, too.  
  
They throw the carcasses out the airlock without much ceremony.  
  
“This is fine,” says Tesla, in a tone that Nnoitra decides does not need answering.  
  


* * *

  
  
“Hey,” says Nnoitra, ten hours later, sprawled on his own bed and fresh and hot from the shower. He’s been thinking about sex. Mostly because he cannot remember a time since Tesla got on this ship that he’s gone so long without it. He’s taught himself to be horny at very frequent, very regular intervals, and now he feels itchy and restless.  
  
The public address system gives a low warm buzz. Tesla has been experimenting with nonverbal sounds.  
  
“You can see me, right?”  
  
“I can see everything,” Tesla agrees, “in several ways.”  
  
“Yeah?” says Nnoitra. “That’s good.” And then he kicks off the blanket and slides one of his hands down his hard-toned belly. He cards his fingers through his pubic hair and shivers a little at the drag of his own calluses on the sensitive skin of his cock.  
  
“ _Ohhh_ ,” croons Tesla, buzzing in the speakers. Nnoitra has no idea how he makes the PA system sound so breathless.  
  
It’s not what he wants, but Nnoitra figures he can make do. For a while, at least. He has four hands, _some_ of them must be good for something.  
  
And Tesla sure seems to like watching him.  
  


* * *

  
  
Tesla has control over all the ship’s systems within a day. The ship has an AI, but it’s not very advanced and, as Tesla says, he needs all the hard disk space he can get to store his personality. There’s more than a few petabytes to Tesla, as it turns out. Non-essential systems are now entirely Tesla, because there isn’t room for much else.  
  
The ship’s systems don’t entirely love running him. He seems confident that he is completely stored, but his episodic memory seems to take a long time for him to access.  
  
“I’m very sorry, Nnoitra. I think this is a RAM thing,” he says apologetically.  
  
“Whatever,” says Nnoitra. He knows how to pilot a ship, but he has no idea about building them, and he’s not great with the main computer anyway. He uses it for guidance and to tell him when the fuel’s low and if all the systems are operating. He hadn’t known 'petabyte’ was a word until an hour ago.  
  
With his control over the ship’s systems, Tesla has limited capacity even outside of the internal parts. The maintenance arms installed on the ship come with a series of fabrication arrays and templates, not for anything terribly meaningful -- spare parts, mostly -- but it isn’t long before he manages to make a slightly wonky cleaning drone. It runs into things a bit and it sometimes leaks soap, but it makes a net contribution to ship cleanliness, so Nnoitra lets him keep it.  
  
But however good Tesla is with them, the maintenance arms aren’t in the residential areas of the ship - firstly, there isn’t as much to maintain, and secondly, if they lose atmosphere there the crew is presumably all dead anyway.  
  
Sometimes he coaxes Nnoitra down into the engineering areas of the ship just so his own giant arms can touch him. This is unimaginably stupid, ridiculous and sentimental and Nnoitra refuses on principle. They can’t fuck, so what’s the point. Tesla, in response, becomes rapidly adept at deceit and at sabotaging his own circuitry. 

Somehow, Nnoitra falls for it every time. 

* * *

 

  
Being a ship does not make Tesla any less hungry. The ship’s fuel efficiency is down by about forty per cent.  
  
Nnoitra can’t believe that he’s even still agreeing to feed him if he can’t fuck him. What’s the point?  
  
On the other hand, he’s not sure what might happen if he lets Tesla get too low on fuel. Would it be cool to see a space ship lose its temper and throw a tantrum? Hell yes. Does Nnoitra want to be inside it at that time? Not so much.  
  
They get fuel the same way they’ve been getting fuel: piracy.  
  
So it doesn't really change their routine that much and at least it’s free. And at least Tesla is miles better with the weapons systems than the AI ever was.  
  
“Of course,” says Tesla, when Nnoitra comments on this. “I’m tasked with protecting you, aren’t I? The AI could never want that as much as I do.”  
  
The degree of shameless devotion Tesla is capable of makes Nnoitra uncomfortable ...kind of a lot.

He smacks the computer interface so hard it dents. “Do I _look_ like I need protecting?” he snaps.  
  
“No,” Tesla agrees serenely, because of course he can't fucking feel it when Nnoitra hits externals, “but it is something I want to do anyway.”  
  
_Fuck_ , thinks Nnoitra. He feels like his skin is trying to crawl off. It isn’t a good feeling. “Shut up and take your fucking fuel,” he mutters.  
  
“Yes, Nnoitra.” And he does.  
  


* * *

  
  
The week Tesla manages to make one of the tools on one of his arms all smooth and blunt and gleaming using his own fabrication arrays is a _good_ one.  
  
“That’s --” _**not** gonna fit_, Nnoitra wants to say, but he’s looking at the big mechanical arm and he’s, okay, _fuck off,_ alright, he’s missing Tesla’s own big hot hands.  
  
He figures this is mostly function of how a few weeks ago he was spending sixty per cent of his life in a half-dressed post-orgasm haze and now he’s -- well, he guesses he’s making do with weird synthesised dirty talk.  
  
He’s beginning to wonder if you can order sex toys to a stolen warship without getting arrested, and if getting arrested might be worth the risk.  
  
Yeah.  
  
He reaches out and runs his long fingers over the surface. It’s metal, and so smooth he can’t even feel the grain of it. It should be cold, it looks cold, but it’s not. Tesla’s got it just a little hotter than Nnoitra’s natural body temperature. His guts twist up at the thought.  
  
It’s big enough -- wide and long, a little bigger than Tesla’s cock in his biggest shape -- that it’s going to be a challenge. But... Nnoitra is pretty sure... He measures it against his arm. Yeah. He can _make_ it fit.  
  
“You’d better fucking stay still,” he warns him instead, eyeing the hot metal with determination.  
  
It does fit. It fits and Nnoitra can clutch at the arm itself with all four hands while he gasps for breath.  
  
And Tesla is... he is a machine, now, for now at least, and he doesn’t tire or change pace by accident or have orgasms of his own to distract him -- no. He has no fallible muscles and organic chemistry anymore. He’s just metal and wire, and when Nnoitra says, “Fuck, yes, like that--” Tesla fucks him, _fuck yes, like that_ , precisely and relentlessly until Nnoitra tells him to stop.  
  
Nnoitra keeps him at it after his eye has rolled up into his skull and his voice has turned from breathy moans to breathless screeching. He keeps him at it until long, long after Nnoitra’s own muscles have failed him.  
  
“I liked that,” murmurs Tesla, when Nnoitra’s heaving body is cooling down. All the lights in the corridor feel soft and warm. The air is warm. All the noises of the ship’s operations seem strangely content.  
  
“Mm-hm,” says Nnoitra, slumped against his stupid mechanical limb. He doesn’t even care that one of the other arms has unfolded from the wall opposite and gently, so gently, pulled his hair away from his sweaty face. He can’t feel his fucking legs.  
  
“Do you know,” Tesla says carefully, minutes later, after Noitra’s recovered enough to begin to bat his big metal arm away, because he does not actually need Tesla’s help, “I really think--”  
  
The blunt head of the thing nudges his butt again. “Fuck,” croaks Nnoitra.  
  
“Let me,” Tesla begs. “Please, Nnoitra, let me.”  
  
He begs nicely. Nnoitra blinks rapidly. What the hell, he thinks, why not.  
  
Fifteen minutes after that first, spine-melting orgasm, Tesla figures out how to make the thing vibrate.  
  
Nnoitra screams until his voice goes hoarse.  
  
When he is at least fifty per cent sentient again and he can feel his knees and more or less walk competently, Nnoitra staggers back up to the residential levels. He rips his bed out of the floor and drags it, bedding and all, down to one of the engine corridors. Tesla greets this change with a happy static buzz and takes the load off him.  
  
Then they do it again.  
  



End file.
